L’Échelle mobile des salaires : une histoire hors-la-loi ? (1950-1984)

This article aims to shed light on the history of wage indexation to prices in France from the resumption of collective bargaining in 1950 through the austerity turn of 1982–1984. To this end, we draw on various sources: the national press, trade union press, and parliamentary debates. We demonstrate that the indexation of the minimum wage—the only such provision ever enshrined in law—is a social and political compromise established in the 1950s. It was the unions that secured indexation clauses in company or industry-wide agreements in the 1950s and especially in the 1970s, through the bargaining power they managed to establish with private and public employers, even though these clauses were illegal after 1958. It was the shift in the balance of power that allowed the government, facing disunited unions, to achieve deindexation by phasing out the application of these clauses between 1982 and 1984.